Winter Is Here

So, just like that, winter is here, and, surprise, surpise, I was more or less prepared. All of the animals but one of the breeding flocks of sheep are super well protected from the wind and snow. That one breeding group could use another shelter, which I plan to drag into their paddock today. Everyone has one more cycle to get bred, and then the rams go into a nice big stall in the barn for the winter and the ewes, including the ewe lambs not being bred will be reunited in their one acre winter pasture/feedlot (depending on how much snow there is and for whole long [the pasture is stockpiled]) with enough run in space for all of them. Anyone not bred in two cycles will be slaughtered for mutton in the spring. I have a marginally profitable market for mutton, and I don’t want to have a three month long lambing season, so I will be selecting (and managing) for a flock that, ideally, all lambs within a month to six weeks (I know of farms that lamb out completely in twenty days, but they really know what they are doing).

I feel better about this last group of pigs than I have in three winters of raising pigs. There are twenty of them and they have a draft-free, deep bedded, 1,000 square foot barn to hang out in and a similarly sized barnyard to eat and mill about it in. If it gets super cold, because of the low stocking density in the barn, I can move their feeder and waterer inside, and the pigs will only need to go outside if they want the exercise.

Little by little I am doing it better. Hopefully one year soon I will be doing it right.

 

Minerals

For the last few days I have been looking at the lambs with the sense that something is not right with them, but haven’t been able to put my finger on it. The top 80%-90% are still doing great, but a few of them actually seem to be going backwards. I had a little trouble with meningeal worm a few weeks ago, but I was able to save the five that came down with it and keep the rest from getting it, but I haven’t felt like it was related to that. I haven’t changed their feed or anything like that. So, what is it? What’s the problem? Disease? It doesn’t seem like it. If if it’s not the feed, not parasites and not disease, then what?

Yesterday I had to grab a lamb out of the finishing pen and put him in the sick pen because all of a sudden he was totally sunken, caved in around the middle. When I grabbed him, I couldn’t help but say “Whoa” out loud because he had substantially less fat cover than he should have. He has been on my radar for about five days or so, but only because I felt like he was lagging, not because I thought there was something really wrong with him. I had been thinking that I would swap him out of the finishing pen for one of the beefier lambs that are still out on grass, but when I saw him yesterday, and then especially when I felt him, I realized he had to go into the sick pen. But, why?

Putting a sheep into the sick pen by itself stresses it out, which defeats the whole purpose of the sick pen, so after putting the sunken sheep into the sick pen, I went out and grabbed #85 who I have been watching for weeks. Number 85 has a healthy appetite, drinks plenty of water, has lots of energy, and is always bright and alert, and though he is definitely in the bottom 5%, his frame continues to grow, but he is a skinny minny. He is just not putting much meat on those bones. Since the sunken sheep needed a pen mate, I thought it was an opportune time to bring #85 in to give him some individual attention to see if I can’t get him to start filling out his frame (my feeling is that he has something wrong with him, something genetic or congenital, or something chronic and unresolvable [economically-speaking], but it is still worth a try).

While I was looking over the group trying to pick out #85, my eyes landed on the few that I feel like are going backwards, and I asked myself a little exasperatedly, “Why are these sheep tanking?!” and then it hit me –  minerals. It was probably the minerals! All along I have been feeding the lambs minerals (Fertrell Graziers Choice) out of three six foot long feed troughs because that is what I had handy. However, I am raising these lambs on a contract that includes a weekly slaughter schedule of eight to ten lambs, and about three weeks ago, I decided that the bottom half of the pasture lambs were not growing fast enough for me to be able to meet that schedule. At the rate they were growing it seemed there would be a week or two gap in getting the lambs to slaughter weight. So, wanting to stay on schedule, I put all of the pasture lambs on grain (per the contract, these lambs are grain finished) to get them growing faster in an effort to close the gap, which is working (Ordinarily, I pull eight to ten of the pasture lambs into the finishing pen every week after I take a group to slaughter, in order to keep a month’s worth of lambs in the finishing pen. That way all of the lambs will have received one to two pounds of grain per day for a month before being taken to slaughter.). However, in order to put them on grain, I needed to use the six foot troughs as grain feeders. Because of time constraints I stopped feeding the minerals (if I had more time I could hang around and give the lambs minerals after they finished their grain). Now, three weeks later, some of the lambs are starting to tank, which, knowing absolutely nothing about the metabolism of minerals, I guess is about the right amount of time for the body to use up the minerals and micronutrients contained in the mineral mix and start suffering from a deficiency of one or more of them.

So, yesterday I started making more time. I am now feeding the lambs their grain and then when they are finished, I give them minerals.

If it is the minerals, I think I will know pretty quickly.

In the meantime, the sunken lamb and #85 will get a little extra attention in the sick pen.

(The answer to the question, why don’t you just get mineral feeders? is money. Moneywise the farm has not done well this year and I do not have the cash to invest in any new equipment, no matter how small the expense. I still have hay to pay for, and a substantial percentage of the cash to pay for that hay, which will get the breeding flock through the winter is supposed to be coming from these feeder lambs. Time, while short, is currently not as short as cash.)

 

Can’t Get Enough

(Note: This is just a quick post to get my feet wet on my journey back to blogging)

Last night I really didn’t want to go back out to feed the lambs*, but I did it anyway. I intended to just run out there and throw their hay at them and then run back in the house, but when I got out there I found myself hanging around, walking about the lambs, looking them over, watching them eat, listening to them crunch the hay. After about fifteen minutes, I realized what I had been doing and reminded myself that I didn’t want to be there, that where I really wanted to be was inside sitting on the couch watching an episode of the first season of Farscape online. “Just another minute,” I thought to myself and crouched down to look at the lambs at their level. The little tiny one, the one I call the “pretty girl,” one of the only females in the group, left the hay and walked over. She put her nose out towards me, sniffing. She has the cutest, most delicate features, and she really is tiny, probably only thirty pounds when the rest of them are between fifty and ninety pounds. I raised my hand up toward her, and she braced her legs, ready to run. She sniffed once or twice more, unsure of my intentions, then she reached her nose forward and touched it to my outstretched fingers. Then, her curiosity satisfied, she turned and walked away. After five or ten more minutes it was getting dark, so I slowly stood up and shook my aching legs out, which sent the lambs nearest to me scampering away.

When I got back home, I skipped the couch and went straight to bed.

*Ordinarily this time of year it wouldn’t be necessary to feed hay, but I have 100 feeder lambs over at my neighbors’ place and I underestimated the size of the pasture, so the lambs are currently more or less out of grass. I am feeding them second cutting hay while I build a fence back at the home farm for the breeding flock. Once that fence is finished, I can give the breeding flock’s electronet to the feeder lambs so they can have more pasture. Now that the grass is slowing down, the additional pasture will only last for a few weeks and then I’ll be back to feeding hay, but those few weeks of grass will make a huge difference in my feed bill. And, if I’m lucky we’ll have a bit of Indian summer and the pasture they are on right now will grow back enough to give another week or two of grazing.